The Breakfast Tables at Haley House in Roxbury

Every Friday morning at Haley House Bakery Cafe in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, something quietly radical happens. Volunteers who spent the previous evening in prayer groups and Bible studies show up at five a.m. to knead bread dough, crack eggs, and set tables with actual ceramic plates — not paper, not Styrofoam — for neighbors who are homeless, recently incarcerated, or battling addiction.

Founder Kathe McKenna insists on this detail. "Dignity isn't an abstraction," she says. "It's a real plate and a cloth napkin and someone asking how you take your coffee."

This is the kind of fasting the Lord chooses in Isaiah 58. The people of Israel were confused — they had been skipping meals, wearing sackcloth, bowing their heads like reeds in the wind, and yet God seemed distant. But the Almighty wasn't looking for empty stomachs. He was looking for open hands. "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice... to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?"

The ceramic plate matters. The cloth napkin matters. Not because they feed anyone faster, but because they declare that the person sitting across the table bears the image of God. True worship has always had calluses on its hands. When we stop performing our religion and start living it — setting real tables for real people — then, Isaiah promises, our "light will break forth like the dawn" and we will be called "Repairers of Broken Walls."